Click "Edit content", then click here to add a photo
Participating Artist
Eleni Papaioannou
Berlin, Germany
Eleni Papaioannou is a Berlin-based artist exploring the notion of space through text, drawings, collages and site-specific installations. Often located outside the confines of exhibition spaces, her site-specific installations invite audiences to stumble upon her work as they pass by. She deals with contradictions such as narrative and non-narrative, spoken and unspoken, space between meanings and words, physical and conceptual space.
Papaioannou holds an MA. (UdK, Berlin) and a BA in Fine Art (ASFA, Athens, G. Lappas studio). She has won several grants and prizes such as the Grant from Berliner Projektfonds Kulturelle Bildung, Berlin, "ORTUNG VIII' Schwabach (1st Prize), KKWV Udk Berlin.
She has exhibited work in various group and solo exhibitions, including at the Berlinische Galerie Berlin, Frauen Museum Fürth, Epigraphic Museum Athens (solo), MOP, ZK/U Berlin, intermediae Matadero, Madrid, etc.
Papaioannou is currently working on her project "Sevent Days and A Half / the poetics of fragments", expanding collages into three-dimensional installations. Her work is in private collections across Germany.
Based in — -
Selected Works
Click to add a photoTitle
Haiku Poem (Monolith of Doubt Collection) 2024,
Year · Medium · Dimensions
Price
25 x 25 cm
Click to add a photoTitle
Untitled (face construction), 2026
Year · Medium · Dimensions
Price
72 x 100 cm
Click to add a photoTitle
Untitled (abuse) 2025
Year · Medium · Dimensions
Price
50 x70 x 1 cm
Title
Year · Medium · Dimensions
Price
Title
Year · Medium · Dimensions
Price
Title
Year · Medium · Dimensions
Price
Title
Year · Medium · Dimensions
Price
Title
Year · Medium · Dimensions
Price
Artist Statement
In her new body of work, 'Seven Days and a Half | POETICS OF FRAGMENTS', Eleni Papaioannou once again focuses on the concept of 'fragments'. In an earlier body of work, 'memographies', presented at her solo exhibition of the same name in Schwabach, Germany, in 2014, the artist used interviews with elderly people as her starting point to create 'maps of memories'. The drawings in the 'memographies’ series were linked in some way to the corresponding stories or biographies of the individuals, and were characterised by fragmentation and discontinuity.
Building on these elements and developing them further in her new series 'Seven Days and a Half | POETICS OF FRAGMENTS', Papaioannou frees herself from the constraints of narrative. Using a fragmentary, non-narrative language, the artist develops her new forms through a new 'meta-language'. She transcends narrative by transforming the essence of the unspoken into images. The images do not refer directly to either people or stories, nor to a personal biography. Instead, Papaioannou focuses on what lies outside language and can unfold into a non-narrative visual language. The small-scale analogue collages often consist of a few elements, recognisable or otherwise, and by utilising the remnants of a form that has been removed, the artist focuses on what is missing – the void – thereby visualising the concept of the fragment. Detached from a situation or a whole, alienated and devoid of context, the fragment is liberated to give rise to new interpretations[1].
[1] As Peter Bürger explains in his book *Theory of the Avant-Garde* (1984), drawing on texts by Walter Benjamin, a characteristic feature of the collage technique is its four phases: a) the isolation or detachment of the fragment from its surroundings (context), b) the combination of fragments to create a new meaning, c) the interpretation of the allegorical gaze as melancholic (the gaze of the viewer as someone who breathes life into the fragmentary object) and, finally, the understanding of allegory as historical decline.
Click "Edit content", then click here to add a photo